Back from the brink? Biodiversity HiveMind Update

Thursday, 29 August 2019, 8:45 am
Press Release: Hivemind

Please join our HiveMind conversation on protecting and restoring biodiversity in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Should we prioritise indigenous species? What should we do about rats, deer and trout? Should we use 1080? What about the Treaty of Waitangi: what should be done to enable kaitiakitanga? Should there be incentives for private landowners to protect and restore biodiversity? These are some of the issues dividing the people taking part in our interactive Biodiversity HiveMind, which launched on 5 August.

Scoop and PEP invite you to join the discussion and share your issues, ideas and perspectives on biodiversity. We also invite you to encourage other people to take part. Click here to find out more about the Biodiversity HiveMind and take part.

At a time when opinion can seem polarised, Scoop’s HiveMind process is able to identify areas of common ground. For example, almost everyone seems to agree that we should innovate to become more inclusive of nature and biodiversity in our city/town designs, that owning water rights should not allow owners to degrade the resource, and that we should be creating more mainland sanctuaries and marine reserves. None of these things are included in the DOC-led discussion document.

There’s been a lot of interest.

Over 280 people have voted more than 11,000 times on a range of ideas and proposals. And lots of people have ideas. So far, 48 people have added over 120 ideas for other participants to consider.

Be in quickly if you want to share your biodiversity ideas. You will be able to add statements for others to consider until 1 September 2019.

You will be able to continue voting until 8 September. We will publish a findings report by 23 September 2019.

If you already took part earlier, please return to the Biodiversity HiveMind to review emerging opinion, consider new statements and add your own statements. HiveMind remembers which statements you have already considered and will present you with new ones.

Click here to take part in the Biodiversity HiveMind.

Our Biodiversity HiveMind is one way for you to take part in the DOC-led public consultation on proposals for a new NZ Biodiversity Strategy. Information about other ways to take part are available here.

Scoop’s new platform The Dig is running an in-depth journalism series on Biodiversity.

In the first guest post Whose Biodiversity Is It Anyway? award-winning journalist and photographer Dave Hansford asks this thought provoking question:

"The DOC-led draft Biodiversity Strategy seeks a 'shared vision.' But there are more values and views around wildlife than there are species. How can we hope to agree on the shape of Aotearoa’s future biota?" Read Now On The Dig >>

You can also help us continue this discussion in the Scoop Citizen Members Forum >>

Join Scoop Citizen Now

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HiveMind

What is HiveMind?

Welcome to HiveMind - Scoop's new public engagement platform. HiveMind is an experiment including our readers in co-creating a more participatory and interactive public media conversation.

We believe online public engagement tools can help groups of people interested in an issue to find new points of commonality and novel solutions to complex societal problems. Such problems require broad-based and inclusive debate and decision making.

It's all too easy for us to remain stuck in polarised worldviews or our social media bubbles. HiveMind seeks to get beyond these echo chambers and to allow people to:

- Engage in a meaningful process
- Learn from other perspectives
- Identify common ground in disparate viewpoints
- Create potentially innovative and practical solutions to real world issues

HiveMind uses Pol.is - an online tool for collecting open-ended feedback from large groups of people. Through a HiveMind exploration you can voice your opinion about a story or issue, and can also agree and disagree with what others are saying, one statement at a time. New statements go through a moderation process and then are added so that participants can vote on them.

Pol.is runs statistical analysis on these voting patterns in real-time. It produces opinion groups and surfaces the comments that brought each group together. It also identifies comments that found broad consensus among participants.

Read more about HiveMind here.

Contact HiveMind

• Email - Joe Cederwall - joe@scoop.co.nz